Mark Zuckerberg Makes $6 Million A Day

The 29-year-old dentist’s son led the top 10 U.S. chief executives with $2.27 billion or more than $6 million a day.

Zuckerberg’s base salary was $503,205 but majority of his earnings came from 60 million Facebook share options when the company went public last year.

These 10 highest paid U.S. chief executives received more than $100 million last year, which happened for the first time, as declared by the GMI Ratings annual poll on executive pay.

“I have never seen anything like that,” said Greg Ruel of GMI. “Usually we have a few CEOs at the $100 million plus level but never the entire top 10.”

Kinder Morgan CEO and chairman of energy Richard Kinder came in second place with $1.1 billion.

In the third spot are Liberty Media CEO Gregory Maffei and Mel Karmazin of Sirius Radio with $391 million. Maffei appeared twice in the list, also on the 7th spot with $136 million as CEO of Liberty Interactive.

Five who made it to the top 10 are company founders. All the ten CEOs took home over $4.7 billion between them.

Completing the list were Tim Cook of Apple with $144 million; Edward Stack of Dick’s Sporting Goods with $142 million; Howard Schultz of Starbucks with $118 million; Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com with $110 million and Frank Coyne of Verisk Analytics with $100 million.

GMI surveyed 2,250 U.S. chief executives and found an average increase in their compensation of 8.47%.

“While the companies in this year’s list have performed well over the past three and five year periods in terms of shareholder return, generally speaking, it’s the sheer size and volume of equity awards granted to these top executives that catapults their total compensation to astronomical levels.”